Policy: The Human Cost Of Third-Country Deportations

0:28This is Ira Glass. Liberia, Guatemala, South Sudan, Guyana, Ghana, Honduras. Those are just some of the more than 30 countries the Trump administration has now struck deals with to accept immigrants deported from the U.S. And that list is growing. Since President Trump took office last year, more than 25 ,000 people have been sent to over 29 countries they're not from. That includes the West African country, Equatorial Guinea. So on Friday morning, they say, they watched Equator Guinean security forces drag away a 31-year-old man, Ahmed Solomon, along with a fellow detainees from Eritrea whose identity we are withholding for his safety.

1:12According to these witnesses, both men were bound with robes and had bags placed over their heads. Officers beat them on the head, on their back and ribs with their elbows, knees, and gun barrels while demanding to know where their phones were. They were forced down a staircase, still bound and hooded. That was Tutu Alicante. He's a human rights attorney in Equatorial Guinea. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Today, we're checking in on the expansion of Trump's third country deportation campaign and the human and economic cost of it. That's just ahead right after this short break.

1:50Stay with us.

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2:30Over the last year, hundreds of thousands of listeners have been tuning in. And I gotta say, if you haven't yet, you're missing out. Listen to the It's Been a Minute podcast from NPR today. This message comes from BetterHelp. Imagine carrying a backpack every day. It is easy not to notice how heavy it is until someone asks if there's a desire to put it down. Therapy can help lighten what has been carried. Visit BetterHelp.com slash NPR. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. We're checking in on the expansion of Trump's third country deportation campaign. Joining us in studio is Yael Shaker. She's the director for the Americas and Europe at the nonprofit Refugees International.

3:14She's also the founder of the website tracker Third Country Deportation Watch. Yael, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me. Also with us is Meredith Yoon. She's the litigation director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Atlanta. It's a nonprofit legal advocacy group for Asian Americans in Georgia and the Southeast. Meredith, welcome back. Thanks so much. And we reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to be a part of this conversation or to offer us a statement. They declined to join but did send a statement, and we'll read what they sent us a bit later. Now, Meredith, we last spoke to you in March about the Trump administration's third country deportation campaign.

3:53What's happened since we last spoke? Since we last spoke, the Trump administration has expanded the use of third country deportations and entered even more agreements with other countries to accept U.S. deportees. the U.S. has now entered into approximately three dozen of these agreements, including more than a dozen with African countries. Since we last spoke, people have been deported to Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, and a number of other countries, as well as to Latin America. The number of these flights has increased substantially. Eventually, we have seen dozens and dozens of people being deported to African countries without notice, without any sort of due process, forced onto these planes and not informed until after the plane has left the country where they are being taken.

4:55Many, and in fact, most of those who are being deported under these agreements have protections, usually in the form of withholding of removal or protections under the Convention Against Torture, meaning they have proven it is more likely than not that they will face persecution or torture if sent back to their country of origin, which is exactly what has happened to many people who have been sent to third countries under these agreements. We'll talk a little bit more about who's being sent to these third countries. But, Yael, explain a little bit more about the agreements the Trump administration is forming with these countries.

5:31Yeah, so it's using two provisions in the immigration law, misusing them, actually. These are exceptional provisions that are basically designed to be exceptional. And the Trump administration is claiming they're like a necessity that they need to use them to deport, as they say, criminals or people who are illegally in the United States. But as Meredith was saying, a lot of the people that they're actually targeting for sending to these third countries are asylum seekers. So there's one provision that's sort of an exceptional idea that if you – if there's a safe third country that you can send someone to to seek asylum there rather than in the United States.

6:14You can send a person to that country to have their asylum claim heard there. The countries that the Trump administration has claimed are safe third countries are countries like Honduras or Ecuador, where the Trump administration is sending a few people pursuant to these agreements. But most importantly, are using the agreements to basically just terminate tens of thousands of cases in immigration courts. It's almost a just, the agreements on paper with these supposedly safe countries, which aren't actually safe, are used as a justification to deprive people of their day in court and the hearing on the merits of their asylum claim.

6:58So I just want to understand the way these agreements are written or the way these rules were supposed to work. Someone is awaiting, say, an asylum hearing. They have proven that it's not safe for them to go back to their country. the United States can then use whatever provision this is in the law to have them wait for that hearing in a third country. But under the rules as they're being applied now, people are being sent to third countries and their asylum claims are also being ended? Is that what you're saying? So there's two provisions that they're using. This one, the safe third country provision, was really designed for people who had not yet made a claim in the United States.

7:40Basically, people coming to the border for the first time in the Trump administration or any administration basically saying, sorry, you're not going to seek asylum here. We're going to find another country for you to seek asylum in. But that's not how they're actually using it. They're using it for people who have been living in the United States for a couple of years, have applied for asylum, are getting ready for their hearing in the court. And the Trump administration is just terminating that and saying that they can send them to these third countries. The agreements that Meredith was talking about, too, are under a different provision of the law, a second type of agreement, especially with most of the African countries.

8:13These agreements are basically designed to, if a person already has an order of removal and needs to be deported but cannot for some reason be deported to their home country, The law says that in exceptional cases, they can be deported to any country that will accept them. Never in U.S. history has an administration targeted for removal the very people who have won the protections that Meredith was talking about. So people, they may have an order of removal, but what they've also been found is to be actually refugees. And so the Trump administration is using these two exceptional provisions of the law to deport asylum seekers and people who have basically been deemed to be refugees to third countries.

9:02And they've made these agreements with countries which are not safe, which don't actually have asylum systems for people to apply for asylum there, like places like Honduras, places like Ecuador. or other countries in Africa, which are themselves subjecting people to either persecution or simply repatriating them to the countries in which they've fled. We'll get into the payments the U.S. has made to some of these countries. That includes$7.5 billion to Rwanda to accept just seven people. That's according to Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. You mentioned asylum seekers, but who else is getting caught up in this net of third country deportations?

9:46Exactly who Meredith was talking about. So there are these asylum seekers who are seeking protection in the United States and have not yet had their day in court. And this means, by the way, I spoke to a Colombian woman who came here with her children and was sent to Honduras to seek asylum there. But her children who she came with were left in the United States. So these are really, really difficult agreements are being made and they're creating family separation. And they're sending very vulnerable people to places where they cannot seek protection. But the other agreements are, as Meredith said, people who have come to the United States frequently many years ago and sought protection from immigration courts.

10:29For some reason, they may not have been eligible for asylum for technical reasons, but they were found to meet a higher burden, actually, even than asylum seekers to be likely to be persecuted in their home country or tortured, being granted these protections under the Refugee Convention, under the Convention Against Torture. So these are refugees and they are getting caught up in these agreements. And I think this is crucial that though the Trump administration portrays these agreements as targeting people who are illegally in the country or people who have committed crimes, it is in fact targeting people who are seeking protection or who are found to be refugees.

11:11And in this way, these agreements are really undermining refugee protection. Now, we should note that the Department of Homeland Security says, as you just alluded to, that some of these people have been convicted in the U.S. of serious crimes or sexual offenses. But according to reporting from Politico, many of them had already served their sentences here in the U.S. Meredith, you have several clients who've been deported and sent to countries other than their countries of origin. Briefly, what are they telling you about what they're experiencing? People who are being deported under these agreements are being detained indefinitely and not free to leave, particularly in Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Sierra Leone.

11:51They are under constant threat of being sent back to the countries they fled from and also under constant threat of physical harm. They have limited access to lawyers, limited ability to communicate with loved ones, with legal counsel, and they are not receiving basic needs. They're not having their basic needs met, particularly around medical care. A number of my clients in Equatorial Guinea have fallen ill with malaria, with typhoid. Several individuals whom the U.S. deported to Equatorial Guinea have very serious medical conditions for which they are not receiving treatment, life-threatening medical conditions.

12:37They are surrounded by armed guards. They are not free to leave. They are threatened that if they try to escape, they will be shot. Well, let's pause here. Up next, we speak to Democratic Senator Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire. She sits on the chamber's Foreign Relations Committee about the price tag of the administration's third country deportation and more. We'll be right back.

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13:52If you put anyone under a microscope or any community under a microscope, you're going to find reasons to harass people or to ticket them or to arrest them. Listen to Code Switch in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. We're checking in on the expansion of the Trump administration's third country deportation campaign and the human and economic cost of it. Now, let's bring a new voice into the conversation. Senator Jean Shaheen is a Democrat from New Hampshire, and she's the top Democrat on the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee. Senator, thank you for joining us.

14:28Good morning. Now, as we said, we reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for this conversation. Here's the statement they sent us. The Trump administration is utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, Just as President Trump promised, these third-country agreements, which ensure due process under the U.S. Constitution, are essential to the safety of our homeland and the American people. We should say DHS says the Trump administration has deported about 985 ,000 people. Yael, your tracker estimates 25 ,000 of those are third-country deportations.

15:01deportations. Senator, I'd first love to hear your response to the administration's argument that these removals are happening legally and constitutionally. Well, in fact, that's inaccurate because they're deporting people who have already had court orders that they could stay in the United States, and they're sending them to places. We have an example of an Afghan man whose family served alongside the United States in Afghanistan in the fight and a woman from Iran who is a pro-democracy activist. They have both been given U.S. protections, and they were sent to the Central African Republic. So that's just not accurate.

15:45In February, you and the other Democrats on the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee released a report on the cost of the administration's third-country deportation deals. What did this report find? Well, as of January 2026, and let me just qualify this by saying it's a huge issue to try and get information because the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department have both not been forthcoming about what they're doing, the countries that they're sending deportees to, and how much they're paying those countries. So it's been very difficult to get information. But as of January 2026, the five countries that the Trump administration had collectively paid more than$32 million to take in migrants had only received about 300 third country nationals.

16:37And just to give you some idea of how much they're paying, for seven people to send to Rwanda, they spent seven and a half million dollars. So about one point one million per deportee. And now we estimate and again, because they won't share any information, we estimate that they've spent over three hundred million dollars for just several thousand deportees. And I know that your guests suggested about 25 ,000 people have been deported, but the vast majority of those have been sent back to Mexico. So we're talking about individuals who are being sent to third countries, many of whom have terrible records with respect to corruption.

17:28So we don't know what the money is being used for because there's no oversight from the State Department for how that money is being spent. This is a huge cost to taxpayers, and it's totally inefficient and ineffective, and the administration needs to be taken to court and shut down this operation. You said you're having difficulty getting the details around these agreements, how much money the administration is spending to set up these agreements with foreign countries. Where are you finding information? Well, we have sources within various departments of government. We're not going to name those sources because we know that this administration deals out retribution to anybody who provides information that's in opposition to what the administration wants to do.

18:20But we've also had an opportunity to talk to the families of some of those deportees about what has happened to their family members. And let me just let me give you another example. The Trump administration sent a Jamaican national to Eswatini in Africa. It cost about$181 ,000 to do that. He was flown more than 7 ,000 miles back to Jamaica on a series of U.S.-funded flights. And what Jamaican officials said is that their country had never been unwilling to take him and that they were not contacted by anybody at DHS or ICE. Um, so this is just, it's not only a terrible waste of taxpayer dollars, not to mention the human rights violations, but it's totally incompetent.

19:15This is an incompetent administration. Senator, what kind of response are you hearing from your colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both Democratic and Republican? I think it's fair to say, well, all of the Democratic members of the Foreign Relations Committee signed on to the report because they share the concern about what's happening. The Republican members did not. And that's the end of it on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that your Republican colleagues just simply didn't sign on to the report. And does that end the conversation? Well, you should ask them. We would love to.

19:57So we will extend an invitation to your Republican colleagues to ask them to talk about this report and their thoughts about it. What legislative action is Congress able to take to ensure that these deportations aren't abused by the administration and are being conducted constitutionally, if at all? Well, obviously, we are trying to do what we can to track what the administration is doing, as I said, because they're not willing to share this information. It's difficult to do that. And we're also, we put out the report, we're sending letters. Obviously, we can file legislation, but given the majority control in Congress, it's unlikely that legislation is going to move.

20:46You know, Senator, the administration argues that these third countries are agreeing to accept people. So if their countries of origin are dangerous, this arrangement is mutually beneficial. And they also say, if a person legally can't be deported to their home country by the U.S. and the only place they can be sent is to a third country, how do you respond to that argument? Well, again, as I just gave you an example of the Jamaican man who could have been sent back to his home country if anybody had ever inquired. But they're so incompetent, they didn't inquire. Also, the fact that we're sending Afghans who have worked alongside of America to places like the Central African Republic, where they have no connections, where corruption is rampant, where there's no oversight, where there's concern about mistreatment and torture for people being held.

21:54It's just there's no good explanation for why we should be doing this. These are not, I think my constituents in New Hampshire, the members of Congress that I talk to on both sides of the aisle, agree that if someone has violated our criminal laws in the U.S., if they are a threat, they should be deported. There's no question about that. They should be detained and deported. But we also believe in due process here in America. And for people who are fleeing asylum and torture and threats in their home country. The fact that we are rounding them up and sending them to third countries where they have no protections, where they have no connections, no way of operating.

23:02And the fact that many of them we are also then sending back to their home countries. And for folks like Afghan refugees, who we ask to support our men and women during the war in Afghanistan, who risked their own lives, their families' lives, who we welcomed into America when we left that country, to be sending those folks back to places where they have no connections and then get sent home where the Taliban is threatening their lives and their family lives. There's no good explanation for why the United States of America would do that. Senator, we got this question from Madeline who says, which department of government is paying these third countries to receive deported asylum seekers?

23:59One country got paid$7 million. Who is paying for this? Also, who is making money on these flights? I mean, ultimately, the American taxpayer is funding this operation, but do we know from which department the money is flowing? Yes, the State Department. And as you point out, it is your caller and the American taxpayers who are footing the bill for this, for this incompetence. And so we know we have midterm elections just ahead. If the balance of power ships in the House and Senate, what do you plan to do then? Well, I hope that if either the House or Senate or both will change the direction and shut down this kind of operation.

24:50Again, Again, if someone has violated our criminal laws and if they're a threat to the public safety, then we all agree they should be considered for detention and deportation. But that's not the case with most of these people that we're talking about. And they're being sent to third countries. You know, a number of them, they sent about 15 Latin American migrants and asylum seekers to the Democratic Republic of Congo. including a woman who fled Colombia to escape rape and torture. She was granted protection by an American judge in February of 2025, and yet she was sent to the DRC, which now has an active Ebola outbreak, and where the administration's own State Department has a level four or travel advisory warning individuals not to travel to the country.

25:47I mean, that's, how do you explain that action? How can America, which has prided ourselves on being a melting pot for refugees, being a place where people fleeing persecution and torture and crime, have been able to come and build a new life. And we're sending them back to places, not just to home, but to places where there is no oversight of what's happening to them, where there is corruption in the government, and we're spending millions of dollars to do that. Well, that's Democratic U.S. Senator Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire. Senator, Thank you for speaking with us. Thank you. Yael, I'd love to first come to you to get a response to what we heard there from Senator Shaheen.

26:49Yeah, I just wanted to double stamp something that she said about the funding for this coming from the State Department. And I think what she was talking about is the funding that the State Department used to use for humanitarian support for refugees in third countries. Like, you know, there are big refugee camps in Kenya that the U.S. used to send money to help support those people there to have food and safety. We are now using the money from those accounts to deport people who have found to be refugees to a third country and paying those countries. So we're almost flipping U.S. humanitarian architecture for refugee protection on its head, both financially and legally.

27:41You know, the United States has a tradition of providing refugees with protection here, either through the asylum system or through refugee resettlement. The branch of the State Department that used to handle that is now has been renamed the Office of Remigration to basically make deals with third countries to send people to them, refugees, people who have found to be. So, you know, and we're talking about people like Iranian democratic activists. I talked to a Russian anti-war activist who had been detained and who had been granted withholding of removal to Russia because he would definitely have been thrown in prison by the Putin regime.

28:23He remained detained in the United States for over a year during the Trump administration after being found to be a refugee while the U.S. looked for another country to deport him to. That's what we're talking about here. And so I do think that this is right. And I think, I hope that if the Congress shifts to be more democratic, a couple of things might happen. Well, let's get to that in a moment. Meredith, Senator Shaheen mentioned that the Trump administration should be challenged legally around this practice. What legal challenges are we seeing? And have they been successful? I could not agree more with the senator.

29:05So there are legal challenges and they are moving their way through the courts. The main case is the case of DVD v. Mullen, which is currently pending before the First Circuit Court of Appeals after District Court Judge Brian Murphy ruled that the Trump administration's third country deportation policy is unlawful. So that appeal is still pending. Lawsuits have also been filed outside of the U.S. For example, a group of attorneys were part of a coalition that filed a complaint with the African Commission on Human and People's Rights on behalf of 14 individuals that the United States deported to Equatorial Guinea, raising issues involving arbitrary detention, conditions of confinement, and chain refoulement.

29:52And that is what Yael is referring to when she speaks of people being sent on from the receiving country to their country of origin while they're likely to face persecution or torture. After we filed that lawsuit in June, the African Commission did request provisional measures from the government of Equatorial Guinea to immediately cease with the rights violations that are happening there. We'll talk more about the conditions in the third country so which people are being removed in just a moment. Stay with us.